Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Review

Name: Samsung Series 5 Chromebook Review - Page 5
Brand: Samsung

by Ray Willington — Tuesday, July 05, 2011, 09:00 AM EDT

Battery Performance

Page 5: Battery Performance

Samsung claims that the sealed battery (i.e. non-user removable / serviceable) will last through 8.5 hours of average use. That's a really long time in the current netbook landscape. It's really long when you consider that no "extended" battery is required here. No external bulge or anything like that. But this is where a stripped-down OS thrives; since there's only a browser to keep on, it's not like the battery is ever going to be under an immense load.

Due to dealing with an operating system that doesn't allow us to load our standard BatteryEater Pro, we weren't able to do an apples-to-apples comparison between the Series 5 and other machines in its price range. As we stated before, the Series 5 is blazing a new trail, even in battery life testing.

Battery Life Testing

Medium Workload Test Conditions

The good news is that Samsung is accurate with their claims. With Wi-Fi active (which is going to be the case if you plan on making good use of a cloud-based operating system), we managed to get 8 hours and 12 minutes of use before the battery could no longer take any more abuse. That was with the screen brightness at roughly half, and off/on typing use through an average workday. With Wi-Fi off (using this solely as a document editor), the machine lasted 9 hours and 39 minutes with the screen at half-brightness.